SPEEDRUNNING MUSIC-INDUCED HIGHS VIA ANIME OPENINGS

BLAKE MORRISON - Writer, 2nd Year, Intended English and Japanese

"90 second anime openings have ruined my music attention span"

How do I enjoy music? Here’s how: I find a song I like and listen to it on repeat until I don’t like it anymore. Okay, “don’t like” might be too harsh of a way to put it. It’s more accurate to say that I’ll keep listening to a song until it stops doing anything for me, stops giving me goosebumps, stops raising my heart rate, stops making me feel. This makes me sound like a drug addict, but honestly, out of all the media we consume day to day, music is the most like a drug in my mind. And if your average American pop song is a weak strain of marijuana, a catchy anime opening is pure crack cocaine. How do they do it? I don’t know, but I can tell you which songs do it for me, or rather used to do it for me because I’ve listened to them so much that their initial effect has dulled and become a fond and faint memory, forcing me to chase my music highs elsewhere.

Me when an anime op stops giving me a high

99.9% of modern anime openings are about 90 seconds long. Of course, even with songs that are commissioned specifically for the anime they appear in, the 90 second version is not the full version but rather the tv size. That said, you can tell that these songs are produced for a 90 second duration in mind. A lot of the full versions of anime openings are best described as the 90 second version times two or maybe three in length with perhaps a key change or two thrown in there with different instruments accompanying the chorus the second time around. I’m not a music critic, but even I can tell how lazy this is. There are some anime openings whose tv size versions I love, like the second opening for Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, but the full version is just the tv size times two in length with a fade out for the ending. No melodic conclusion, no nothing. It’s nothing but a fade out. That’s how you know they weren’t trying.

But enough negativity. What anime openings give have once upon a time given me a high? Although I can’t stand the anime it’s from, My Dearest by Supercell kept me coming back longer than most. The full version doesn’t just follow the 90x2 formula either, it’s a 5 minute 39 second pop anthem. Sure, the basic structure is the tv size times three, which is to say the chorus repeats thrice, but the execution is so much more than that. The buildup to the first chorus is extended from the tv size version, for instance, and there’s a completely new guitar section that starts at the 3:50 mark before we go back to the chorus one more time with more intensity than ever before. There’s also this beauty to the vocals of Koeda (aka Aikono Kikakina), who was only 15 years old at the time of the original recording and yet was able to lend a deep richness to the vocals that most singers at the height of their careers can’t match. The buildup to the chorus starting at 1:20 also still gets me to this day. It’s the violins swelling delicately and sonorously paired with the drums that have hitherto been in the background kicking into high gear with Koeda’s voice going resolutely forth among all of it (遠く遠 くどこまでも遠く君と二人〜). Well, I guess this song still gives me a high now that I think about it.

That’s the thing with me. I’ll listen to an anime opening I like an absurd amount of times, and even if it’s something I love dearly like A Cruel Angel’s Thesis or Staple Staple or My Dearest, it’ll get stale eventually. But if I let the song sit for a bit, let my tolerance to its charms drop day by day as I refrain from listening to it, eventually I get to the point where I can recapture some of the magic of my first listen. And then I’ll listen to it repeatedly until the thrill ends once again. I never learn.

Please, someone tell me to stop